Info Mashing: Good Day, Sunlight!

Ever wondered what specious backroom deals your elected officials have been making with lobbyists, contractors, friends, and family? The Sunlight Foundation has just unveiled a plan to make such info available online, accessible to you and me.

Cool, huh?

Information Mashing. Don't you just love that term? It's one of the major goals of Sunlight and while we've been working on it for the past couple of months we have a ways to go before it happens in any substantial way. Our goal is simple: integrate in a user-friendly way individual data sets (like campaign contributions, lobbyists and government contracts) that makes the whole larger than the sum of its parts.

We'd like to create something we've dubbed an "Accountability Matrix." A website where, with one click you can look up a major donor and see not just their campaign contributions, but also their lobbying expenditures, the names of members who've flown on their private jet, the names of former congressional staffers they've hired, and so on.

In a nutshell, we want to make information more liquid and more accessible to the public. Our initial thoughts would be to establish this as a distributed infrastructure where various groups maintain their specialty databases, but provide a mechanism to link the data sets. This idea of "information liquidity" will allow analyses and public access previously never before possible. Obviously we'll have to come up with a really user-friendly interface.

Our initial experiment is likely to be to combine core state campaign finance information from the Institute on State Money and Politics with top federal donors as compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. We've been talking with both groups about a beta project that would be publicly available this summer. Their techies have been putting their heads about how to mash their somewhat disparate data together and I expect to have a proposal from them soon.

User-friendly interface. What a refreshing idea! Elected officials who've long hidden behind obscure dead-of-night paper filings can't be thrilled about the idea of citizens with one-click access to their shadowy deals.

Good Day, Sunlight! Shine that light!


So you think you know Delilah?
Judges 16:19-- And she made him (Samson) sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head.